Early Years Pioneers: Margaret Donaldson

Who is Margaret Donaldson?

After leaving school, Margaret Donaldson attended the University of Edinburgh, where she gained her first degree, followed by a master's in education and a doctorate. After an influential career, publishing insightful books and articles and becoming a highly respected professor of developmental psychology, she retired from full-time academic life. But she has continued her thoughtful contributions, including books for children and her work of scholarship exploring the relationship between thought and emotion, Human Minds.

In the 1950s, while still a student, Donaldson had become interested in children's thinking. This interest was further inspired when, just after finishing her PhD, she spent a term at Piaget's institute in Geneva (see Nursery World, 19 January). This encounter had, she states, 'a big influence on the subsequent direction of my work'. Professor Donaldson adds that, during the early 1960s, visits to the United States and the opportunity to undertake some work at Harvard University with Jerome Bruner and his colleagues were also key experiences.

Disembedded thinking

What is exciting in Margaret Donaldson's work is her interest in how children try to make sense of their experiences in the context of what they already know and have experienced. Yet, as Donaldson and her colleagues pointed out more than 20 years ago, some children reach damaging conclusions about their own self-worth and their abilities as thinkers and social beings, because of difficulties in acceding to the demands of school life. Such conclusions on the part of a young child affect not only their self-respect and general well-being, said Donaldson; their subsequent progress is also marred. In particular, Donaldson's team suggested that the school activities which can cause children to fail 'woundingly' are those that form the core of the traditional curriculum - literacy and numeracy.

They proposed that what we need to do is provide more support to children who find school tasks difficult, and to try to better understand factors that contribute to failure. We should continually strive to understand young children, not simply the limitations they may appear to have or the types of problems they find challenging, but the skills and capacities that they do possess. Margaret Donaldson urges us to find out what children are likely to be good at by the time they begin primary school and explore how this relates to the subsequent learning that is expected of them.

Piaget's work had been influential in the field of early childhood education and in developmental psychology from the middle of the 20th century to the 1980s - some would say that influence continues in the English-speaking world. However, Piaget himself encouraged 'continued construction and reorganisation' of scientific thought, and Margaret Donaldson and her colleagues sought to endorse this principle. Becoming known as Post-Piagetians, they gathered research findings showing recognition for the way that language and thought develop in interpersonal contexts in infancy and early childhood, stating that children's thinking is usually guided towards an immediate goal and relates to their understanding of human purposes. So, if tasks are set for young children but do not include these features, they will not make sense.

Donaldson also proposed that different settings impact on children's understanding of language. Just as one would in an everyday setting, like the home, young children try to use other embedded cues, such as the speaker's actions, to interpret their language and try to understand what the person means, rather than what their words mean. Whereas embedded tasks happen spontaneously in the course of our everyday interactions, many school tasks are what Donaldson calls disembedded tasks.

Related to this, Piaget had pointed out that young children are often aware of their goals but not aware of the means to achieve them. Consciously thinking how to achieve a goal is rare in the spontaneous world of everyday life, but for school-type disembedded tasks, it is essential.

Egocentricity Donaldson was also interested in Piaget's claim that young children are egocentric (unable to decentre from their own point of view). So, together with Martin Hughes, she presented special tasks similar to Piaget's and Inhelder's 'mountain task' to children aged three and four years. Instead of having each child indicate which view of three model mountains a doll would see, they asked children to take part in games of hide and seek - to 'hide' a boy doll from a policeman doll who was said to be looking for him, in different arrangements of model walls. They found that however complex they made the game, most of the children succeeded. They believed the success was the result of the tasks making sense to the children, while Piaget's mountain task did not.

This research supported Donaldson's earlier conclusion that the ability to identify with another's feelings and intentions - the opposite of egocentrism - is a fundamental human skill, possibly evident during the first months of life and certainly well-developed by the age of three.

Margaret Donaldson's main messages for the field

Donaldson's work has progressed Piaget's ideas, building on his foundations and exploring young children's need for environments and tasks which make sense to them and which recognise their early dependence on embedded thinking. However, like Piaget, she has argued that there are stages in the development of thinking.

Perhaps her main messages to the field of early childhood education and care are that we should get to know the children with whom we work, their abilities, achievements and understandings, and that we should reflect on the environment and tasks we prepare for them. Our greatest challenge is to endeavour to assist children in developing disembedded thinking. The findings of recent research by the REPEY team suggest young children learn best through sustained shared thinking. It is in such interactions that, as Donaldson says, children 'wonder, they question, they try to make sense.

And, not infrequently, when they direct their questions at us they push to the limit our ability to answer them.' NW

Tricia David is Emeritus Professor of Education, Canterbury Christ Church University and Honorary Emeritus Professor of Early Childhood Education, University of Sheffield

Suggested reading

• Donaldson, M (1978) Children's Minds. London: Fontana
• Donaldson, M (1992) Human Minds. London: Allen Lane/ Penguin Press
• Donaldson, M, Grieve, R and Pratt, C (eds) (1983) Early Childhood Development and Education. Oxford: Blackwell
• Siraj-Blatchford, I, Sylva, K, Muttock, G, Gilden, R and Bell, D (2002) Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years (REPEY). DfES Research Brief 356. London: DfES